An Issue on Copyright

The internet is a liberal place. You can look or add any content even without regards to accountability. Accountability is difficult to assert over the internet since you are mostly faced with millions of faceless users.

For many e-businesses, despite the vast virtual space the internet provides, the competitions is getting stiffer by the minute. As more and more people get hooked with internet, many people stumble on new online opportunities that one can potentially turn to an income generating channel.

Generally there is no issue on competition. Healthy competition makes the market a healthy market as well. However when you are trying to compete amongst others using underhanded techniques that could leave some competitors tilting then that is unfair.

I guess, it is apparent that I am one of those brilliant people behind the website LazyMask. If this is your first time to encounter LazyMask, well, this is one outsourcing company that primarily does clipping path and image masking. Although LazyMask has some other services to offer such as photo restoration, image manipulation, and image enhancing, still this outsourcing firm is famous for its fast and reliable clipping path and image masking services.

Anyway, clipping path and image masking is a booming outsourcing niche in the graphic industry. I bet once or twice many graphic artist might have used these services or might have stumbled upon websites such as these.

Anyway, earlier this year, around March, my colleague Mich found a competitor site who blatantly copied everything on our site. This is a major ripped off. When copywriting, yes you find contents that you need to fill in a new topic and try to make it catchy. However you don't copy everything. You find ideas, get inspirations and write a new content that is yours. Synthesize the idea and not lazily copy everything.

When we first saw their site, we saw all our content and images plastered there. The only changes were the countries since they are based in China. We patiently wrote them a letter and gave them a one month grace period however up to now our text content is still on their sites. Some of our pictures they took out but the others are still there only hid it under subpages.*Sneaky* To add more injury to already swollen wound they placed a statement at lower portion of their site: "Designed by XXXXXX based entirely on XXXXXX".

When you encounter the same problem. I suggest that you find the details of person infringing your copyrights, hosting company, payment processors and such. You can do this via whois.domaintools.com. This site can give you a comprehensive data about the domain.

This link is really a good guide on how to deal online copyright infringement. You can also refer to Google's Digital Millennium Copyright Act.